r/VancouverStartup

Hey r/VancouverStartup,

Just wanted to share a quick milestone — I officially incorporated my company federally this week.

I'm building a workforce tech platform that connects retiring skilled tradespeople with apprentices for structured mentorship aligned with Red Seal certification standards. The gap I'm solving: non-union employers rarely invest in the field-level mentorship that turns apprentices into competent journeypersons.

Timeline so far:

• Week 1: Posted about the concept on r/VancouverJobs — got 7 organic leads (mentors and apprentices) within days
• Week 2: Built a live MVP, landed 120+ LinkedIn reactions, initiated government partnership conversations with SkilledTradesBC and NRC-IRAP
• This week: Incorporated federally. Next step is IRAP funding ($500K non-repayable)

I'm a 20-year construction professional (JM structural welder, pile driving, marine construction) doing this solo for now. Looking for a technical co-founder eventually — someone who wants to build marketplace infrastructure for a $374B CAD market.

Happy to answer questions about the incorporation process, IRAP, or building in the trades/workforce space. Also want to shout out this sub — the Solo Techies thread and Discord have been solid resources.

Keep building. 🔥

Like most people who cook at home, I find recipes online. And like most people who find recipes online, I've spent years enduring the same experience: click a promising link, get hit with a wall of text about someone's grandmother's kitchen in rural Italy, scroll past 14 ads, and finally find the ingredient list approximately three miles down the page.

I also had recipes "saved" across about six different systems — browser bookmarks (dead links), phone screenshots (impossible to search), a Pinterest board I created in 2019 and never looked at again, and a notes app full of pasted text with no formatting.

So I built Recipe Retriever (https://reciperetriever.app).

How it works:

Paste any recipe URL into the app

AI reads the page and extracts the title, ingredients, and instructions

You get a clean, structured recipe card — no ads, no preamble, no clutter

Save it to your personal digital cookbook

That's the core loop. Paste a link, get the recipe, save it.

Some other things it does:

Image upload — Take a photo of a page in a physical cookbook and it'll extract and digitize the recipe

Meal planning — Organize your saved recipes into a weekly meal plan

Search & filter — Find any recipe in your collection instantly

Works with any site — Food blogs, cooking magazines, newspaper recipe sections, basically any page with a recipe on it

Tech details (for the curious):

The extraction uses AI to parse unstructured web pages and pull out recipe data. It handles the messy reality of recipe blogs — recipes wrapped in WordPress themes with ads and widgets everywhere, different formatting conventions, ingredients split across multiple sections, etc. The goal is to reliably get a clean recipe from any page you throw at it.

What I'm looking for:

Mainly feedback. I've been using it myself for a while and it's become one of those tools I use every day without thinking about it. But I'm curious what other people's experience is — are there sites that don't work well? Features you'd want? Things that feel clunky?

It's free to try. No account required to test the extraction — just paste a URL on the homepage.

Happy to answer any questions about the tech, the product, or the build process.

As a startup, we have an additional ticket available for Websummit from May 11 to May 14. Kindly DM if someone is interested. Please note - ticket transfer will be on first come, first serve basis after verification.

Hey everyone,

I’m based in Vancouver and looking to connect with founders or people interested in building a lifestyle/health & wellness startup focused on things like healthy snacks, smoothies, meals, and wellness products.

Does anyone know good communities, events, Discords, subreddits, or places in Vancouver to meet potential cofounders or people in this space?

Thanks!